The honeymoon period is definitely starting to wear a bit more thin as Bluesky speedruns the history of Twitter. There's a thread where one of the key people behind Skywatch, a popular labeler for content users might find negative, despairs that Bluesky is not doing enough to remove bad actors.
Nothing on Bluesky is *actually* private, but the main thread is marked as only available for logged in users only, so I'll instead link to my replies: https://bsky.app/profile/dustyweb.bsky.social/post/3ld4arouqnc2c
I laid out the general scope of concerns and start of the shape of answers in a document called OCapPub a while ago https://gitlab.com/spritely/ocappub/blob/master/README.org
The actual work is happening at
@spritely
One short note: the "global town square" model is a broken design, IMO. It's also very millenial.
More or less I tend to think that both Bluesky and the present-day fediverse are caught up in chasing the dreams of social networks built by Millenials, for Millenials, on the hopes and dreams that a "global town square" would work.
Very "early web 2.0 zeitgeist" thinking. Doomed, IMO.
It's not that anyone is foolish for taking this route, because of course it's the way we've been, as a global aggregate, assuming social networks would go for the last 20 years. There's a global, context-free space, everyone puts content into it, somehow it's moderated
I do think that public broadcast of content makes sense to some degree, but trying to make the "global context collapse firehose" healthy doesn't feel, to me, where efforts should go.
It's fine for people to keep working on it, but I'm more interested in contextual communication, public and private
The fediverse has a *bit* of a better time with it, because of the moderation-at-borders stuff, but it's wearying and results in the "Nation State'ification of the Fediverse" parts I outlined in OCapPub. Not the right direction either, IMO.
So what's the answer? Contextual communication, including contextual governance. Building systems, both broadcast and private, that *aren't* a global context collapse firehose.
More and more communication is moving to private, locally governed chat rooms, and I think this is related
I don't spend too much time thinking about how to "fix" the current sort-the-global-firehose systems, because I don't think it's where the future is. That's for others to figure out, if they can.
But there's a lot of *opportunities* in contextual communication! So I am excited about that work.
Anyway, Bluesky's attempt at separating "speech vs reach" I think is maybe about as good of a job as you can do with this kind of sift-through-the-global-public-context-collapse-firehose system, but... I think we'll see that users end up being not very happy with it. That's my expectation, anyway.
@cwebber (we are already seeing the failure of this system on Bsky imo; Jesse Singal's recent arrival on that platform has really highlighted the limitations both of the T&S team and the lack of widely used composable moderation)
@cwebber
> Bluesky's attempt at separating "speech vs reach"
what is that?
@Forbearance @cwebber thank you!